Читать книгу Fugitive Mom - Lynn Erickson - Страница 10

SPECIAL AGENT RENEE PAYNTER’S career was on the fast track. As the only female African American agent in the Denver FBI office, she got more than her share of attention, and she knew how to use it to advance her career. She didn’t feel the least bit guilty about using that advantage, either, because she knew she was extremely good at her job.

She was strikingly beautiful, tall and reed thin, her profile pure Nefertiti, her hair pulled back severely into a bun, which enhanced her exquisite bone structure. She wore Armani suits and Italian pumps and no jewelry but her wedding band.

She was a very ambitious lady, and when Special Agent in Charge Mead Towey handed her the potentially high-profile Grace Bennett kidnapping case, she practically crowed out loud with delight.

She’d read the headlines that morning at breakfast. Her husband, Jay, had been chewing his usual Grape Nuts cereal and reading the sports section of the local paper when she’d called his attention to the article.

CU PSYCH PROFESSOR KIDNAPS FOSTER CHILD the headline screamed. Some stringer in Boulder had picked the story up from the court records and run with the lead. The child’s biological mother had been quoted as saying: “She was supposed to give me back my little boy yesterday, but no one can find her. My heart is breaking.”

The Pope woman’s lawyer had stated: “I am turning this case over to the federal authorities today. Grace Bennett’s actions are reprehensible.”

“Jay,” Renee had said, “look at this. Kidnapping.” She’d pushed the paper under his nose.

He’d read carefully and methodically. Jay was a slow-moving, heavyset man, giving some people the idea that he was also mentally slow. But Renee knew better. Her husband was a brilliant, calculating statistician for the FBI. The tortoise to her hare.

She loved her husband. He was her opposite, fitting into her mental and emotional hollows with perfection. He was her rock, and she knew she’d flounder without him. She was aware that people thought them an incongruous couple and that Jay must bore her. But those people didn’t know Jay. Nor did they know her.

What seemed to be slowness was careful consideration. He was brilliant, yet still down to earth, and he saw the world perfectly and objectively for what it was. Jay had proposed the move from Washington, D.C., to Denver, insisting that they’d each have more opportunity for promotion, and he’d been right, as usual.

“So this Grace Bennett took the kid and disappeared,” he had said, watching Renee. “You have any idea why?”

“Selfishness,” Renee had replied instantly.

“It says right here she had the boy for four years. Presumably, the biological mother couldn’t—or, more likely, wouldn’t—take care of her son.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Tell me why a college professor, a woman with an excellent career, would give it all up and run away,” Jay had said mildly.

“I don’t know. But I bet our office gets this case. God, I hope they let me have it.” She’d grinned, her teeth white against her café-au-lait skin. “It’s got promotion written all over it.”

Driving with Jay from their home in Englewood to work that morning, Renee talked of inconsequential matters—when Jay’s widowed mother was coming to visit, who would do the grocery shopping, a movie Renee wanted to see. But her mind was listing the steps an agent would have to take to find the runaway professor.

Interview the grieving mother; do a computer check on Bennett; talk to friends and neighbors of the woman, relatives. Out-of-state relatives? Boyfriend? Co-workers, yes. Did little Charles Pope attend day care?

All right, so the case wasn’t hers, but she still couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Jay parked in the usual place near the downtown Denver Federal Building, and they walked to the entrance together. He kissed her on the cheek, as he did every morning, and they parted ways, going to separate offices.

They both loved Denver now, a sprawling western city that was growing by leaps and bounds. True, it was hot in summer, but not with the cloying and oppressive heat of Washington. And always, when she looked to the west, the tall, cool, snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains stood sentinel.